Masha Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. I'm honored tonight to be here with Masha Gessen, who is one of America's most influential public intellectuals, also one of Russia's most influential. Masha is a very regular columnist for The New Yorker, as you all probably know, and she's written many books on all kinds of topics. Including Soviet mathematics, Putin, her grandmother's genetic screening, and just about anything else you might find interesting. Masha is a true polymath and extremely impressive to all of those who know her. So Masha, welcome.

Thank you very much.

And we just dive right in. Obviously, the first question: why was Soviet mathematics so good?

Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, and basically because of the arms race. Because the Soviet Union realized, you know, World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower. And they realized very quickly that the way to make that happen was to develop weapons technology. And so there was a huge organizing and recruitment effort around the country to find kids who were particularly— had particular math aptitude, yank them out of wherever they were living, put them in specialized boarding schools or specialized schools in their city if they lived in a big city, give them an elite mathematics education, but actually a broad education, but with a focus on mathematics, put them through, through excellent colleges, and then create conditions in science towns for them to live. I mean, they were truly privileged and lived in these sort of incubator conditions. And it was amazing because it was really the only area in the Soviet Union where intellectualism was prized and privileged. So it drew probably a broader range of people than just, you know, kids who were interested in mathematics.

And was the Soviet system of math competitions useful?

You know, that's— there's some debate about that. The Soviets were certainly extremely good at math competitions both in the country and internationally, right? I mean, I can't— it's been many years since I wrote about this, so I can't now remember the statistics, but basically, you know, there were always either winners of the International Math Olympics or, you know, somewhere in the top 3. But if you look at it, I mean, it was a great feeder system for sort of the weapons industry, but you didn't see a whole lot of research mathematicians come out of the math competition system. They seemed to pretty much be on parallel tracks.

What about the emphasis on physical training and athleticism and just being in great shape? Magnus Carlsen does that in chess. Does it matter for math?

It was part of the system. Whether it matters for math, we don't know. But we know that the extraordinary Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who designed the Soviet mathematics education system, he had this idea that it was— it had to be like what he imagined Greek schools to have been like. So he felt that a good literary education a high level of physical culture and mathematics were the keys to success.

Why is it that so many dissidents came from the Soviet worlds of math and physics? There seems to be a correlation, right? What's causing what?

Okay, well, I don't know the answer. I can tell you my personal hypothesis. So my hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and, you know, inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink. And I think that, you know, now when we talk about this kind of an inclination now, I think we talk about, you know, people being sort of spectrum-y and having or being neurologically different and therefore having difficulty with sort of the illogical, irrational ways of life. But, you know, I think we can retroactively diagnose a lot of dissidents with that because basically what we're talking about is there is, you know, the conditions of being not just survival, but of being reasonably comfortable while living in the Soviet Union were the conditions of doublethink. You had to be able to live inside, you know, untenable contradictions all the time. The opposite option was to confront those contradictions, but to basically be thrown out of society, to be in extreme discomfort, right? So think about the type of person who would prefer the discomfort of being completely ostracized to the discomfort of living inside the tension. And I think that that goes some way to explaining why so many people came from math and physics and the exact sciences. And these days when I look at Greta Thunberg, who I was actually, I'm pretty sure the first American journalist to interview her, the now 16-year-old Swedish girl who went on school strike and has started this worldwide climate change movement. She is very— she is diagnosed with autism, and she's very, very clear about talking about how intolerable she finds life with the way that adults are not acting rationally in the face of climate change, and how for her it is an absolute necessity to confront it. And I really recognize that spirit of Soviet dissidence.

Now, you've written a biography of Grigory Perelman, and at some point early on, before he was famous, he tried to get a job at Princeton by basically just demanding one. Would it have been good for his career as a mathematician to have gotten that job? Let's say they had given him tenure, do whatever you want. Good for him, bad for him?

Well, we don't know. There's little evidence that he would've enjoyed teaching. So, you know, basically the conditions that allowed him to, for those who don't know, I assume everybody knows who Grigori Perelman is. He proved the Poincaré conjecture and published his solution on archive, on the web, and without any explication. It took 3 groups of mathematicians about 3 years each to actually delve into his proof and conclude that yes, in fact, it worked. And since then, Perelman, who turned down the million-dollar prize, has basically disappeared.

You don't know what he's doing now?

He claims to not be doing mathematics. And last I heard, he was going to move to Sweden where his sister lives, but I haven't had it confirmed that he moved there. But, you know, the conditions that clearly allowed him to create his proof were conditions of solitude and calm and in St. Petersburg. Would he have done the same thing at Princeton? Would he have found those conditions? Probably. I don't know that it would've made much of a difference.

I have so many questions about Russia proper. Let me start with one. Why is it that Russians seem to purge their own friends so often? The standing joke being, you know, the Russian word for friend is future enemy. There's a sense of loyalty cycles where you have to reach a certain bar of being loyal or otherwise you're purged.

Yeah, I don't know that I agree with the premise of that question. I mean, what kind of purges are you talking about?

People who stop being friends with those who were previously close friends, whereas Americans will drift apart and ignore each other. But there's a kind of discrete break in Russian friendships, as I see it.

Huh, that's interesting. I don't know that I agree, but, uh, but I think that— and, and this may answer your question— you know, Russian friendships are much more emotional and intense than American friendships. I mean, when I moved back to this country 5 and a half years ago It was like the sense of whiplash because I had a lot of friends here, but I had been absent for 20 years and then I would get together with my friends and then 2 hours later our get-together would be over. I'm like, well, what was the point of that? Was that just to let each other know that we still exist? Because you don't really get into deep conversation until about 4 hours in, and a number of bottles of alcohol. If you're going to—

We're missing the alcohol here tonight, right?

We're missing the alcohol here tonight, but if If you're going to like really get down, it's like 3 AM, 4 AM proposition. You can't just like have dinner and go home. So then I realized that this was really a way to be very productive because I could go back to work. I write at night, so I could work after seeing friends, which was amazing, but something that I had never experienced in Russia. So I think that maybe that's what you're referring to. Maybe you're just referring to sort of the emotional intensity of Russian friendship. Where it's hard, you know, it's like, it's like lovers even in this country don't really drift apart. Usually you kind of have to break up. You can't just like stop calling and, you know, and go back, go from, from talking every day to talking every few weeks and then forget about each other's existence.

In Russian grade school, as I understand it, it's often the case you sit in the same room in literally the same seats next to the exact same people. Year after year after year. Is that a good system or a bad system?

That's a great question. I don't know the answer. It is true, and it's very odd to me because I've had kids. My older kids were educated partly in Russia and partly here, and my youngest son is now in elementary school here. I mean, I find it pretty disorienting that every year Americans reshuffle their classes and sort of put kids in a new social situation. There's something amazing to having gone through life from the time you were 6 or 7 with the same people. I think it can foster really incredible friendships. It can also foster, like, you know, awful dynamics, obviously.

Why has Russia basically never been a free country?

You know, most countries have a history of never having been free countries until they become free countries.

But Russia has been next to some semi-free countries. It's a European nation, right? It's been a part of European intellectual life for many centuries. And yet, with the possible exception of parts of the '90s, it seems it's never come very close to being an ongoing democracy with some version of free speech. Why isn't it like, say, Sweden?

Why isn't Russia like Sweden? You know, I mean, I tend to read Russian history a little bit differently in the sense that I don't think it's a continuous history of unfreedom. I think that Russia was like a lot of other countries, a lot of empires, in being, you know, a tyranny up until the early 20th century. And then Russia had something that no other country has had, which is the longest totalitarian experiment in history, you know. And that's a 20th century phenomenon, and it's a very specific set of conditions. And so I don't think it's— I don't read Russian history as this history of, you know, Russians always want a strong hand, which is a very traditional way way of looking at it. I think that Russia, at breaking points when it could have developed a democracy or a semi-democracy, actually, you know, started this totalitarian experiment. And what we're looking at now is the aftermath of the totalitarian experiment.

But it's striking to me, if I speak to non-Jewish ethnic Russians living in the United States, where they have access to all the media, most of them still seem to be pro-Putin. Right? And Putin is not a democratic leader. He's in numerous regards a pretty nasty autocrat. And Russians living in this country, again, non-Jewish, non-Armenian, whatever, seem to support him. What accounts for that ideological strand in Russians?

I think that among Russian emigres, it's actually a very specific thing, which is that there, you know, there have been distinct waves of Russian emigration. My parents and I came here in 1981 as part of the Jewish immigration, and we were fleeing the Soviet Union. My parents made the decision to step into the abyss. They knew nothing about the West or what was going to happen to them here. They thought they would never be able to see their friends and relatives in, in the Soviet Union, and they made this decision to get out of the Soviet Union because it was so important for them to leave the Soviet Union. People who came here and who are much more numerous, who came here starting in about 1990 and basically, you know, through that decade, who I think are the people you're referring to, they were fleeing the collapse of the empire. They were not running away from the Soviet Union. They were not leaving Russia. They were leaving that sense of extreme instability and uncertainty that was created by the end of the Soviet Union. So to them, you know, there's no contradiction between liking Putin, who came in and said, "I'm going to take you back to that imagined stability and predictability of the Soviet Union," right? There's no contradiction between that and what they felt when they were leaving. So I think it's perfectly logical that they support him.

Now, you've been a major advocate of LGBT rights. If you think about Russian culture, do you think it's more homophobic than average compared to other autocracies? And if so, culturally, why might be that the case?

Oh, not at all. I think that the anti-gay campaign that has been a centerpiece of Russian politics for the last now 7 years, it's completely Kremlin manufactured. I think most Russians, you know, had never given the subject any thought, which is of course why it's so effective.

But they haven't given up the campaign. It's endogenous that they're continuing it, right? It's in some ways succeeding there's a positive public response.

Right.

But a country like Turkey, which is a close neighbor of Russia's, it seems homosexuality is more accepted, even though it's maybe in quiet ways.

Well, actually, Erdoğan has also managed to traffic in anti-gay sentiment quite effectively. I mean, this is a theme that we're seeing really, you know, in common among many autocrats in the world right now. And the fact that, you know, that It's not surprising that hatred is getting traction. You know, campaigns of hatred get traction, especially when you control all the media in the country. I mean, how could it not get traction, right? And it's particularly effective, of course, because there was no language, there was no conversation really about sexuality before that campaign began. So it wasn't pushing back against anything that existed. It was just occupying a vacuum. Once the Kremlin started a conversation about sexuality, it owned it.

How constrained is Putin in your view? What's your basic model of how Putin rules and what he can do and what he can't do?

I've never thought of it in terms of constraint. I think that he has a natural sort of inclination for economy, you know, an economy of means. He is not a totalitarian type leader in the sense that he wants to exert only as much forces as necessary. To continue accumulating money and power.

And which of those two does he care about more, money or power?

Well, they're inextricably linked. I mean, he measures his money in power and his power in money, right? But he has applied force when he has encountered resistance, and the application of that force has created totalitarian-type conditions in Russian society. But he is really— I mean, he has not created terror. He has created selective enforcement and has gone after sort of signal enemies and random people in order to create a sense that he controls the country and to minimize the possibility of any kind of resistance.

But saying in 2011, you seemed to think that Putin was on the verge of losing power, and that doesn't seem to be the case. So how have you updated your model? Of how that works. And GDP per capita in Russia has fallen for the last 5 years in a row, right? That can't be good for him. So what is he doing?

It is very good for him. It is very good.

Explain.

Well, because, because Russian society has reconstituted itself as a totalitarian society, poverty and scarcity are actually very good for totalitarian societies. They maintain that sense of mobilization that's essential for totalitarian societies, right? There's, and this is actually not my idea, but I think it has a lot of merit, this idea that the mass protests in Russia that we saw in 2011-2012 were partly a function of prosperity. You know, people lived well enough that they had the luxury of demanding good governance. When you are constantly worried about your survival, you do not actually engage proactively in politics.

What's the chance that Putin leaves office alive? Probability, if you had to give a single number.

You know, I learned my lesson from 2011 that journalists should never make predictions.

But a probability is better than a prediction because—

A probability is, well, okay. All right, well, let's say 50/50, you know, either he leaves the office alive or he leaves office dead. I think he plans to be in office for life.

When you met Putin, what was that like? What was your impression viscerally?

So, you know, some history. I met Putin about 6 months after publishing an unauthorized biography of him that came out in about 20 languages and became a bestseller in many of them. And he didn't know about the book. So that was really interesting because, you know, and it's obvious why he didn't know about the book. In order for him to know about the book, someone would have had to tell him about the book, and nobody wanted to be that person. But my experience of meeting him, you know, he called me and said that he wanted to meet for a different reason that had nothing to do with the book. And I couldn't tell anybody about it because I was afraid of having the meeting canceled. So I just texted— I was in Prague that day. I texted my editor in New York and said, you know, I have to talk to you. Get on Gchat. And so she got on Gchat and I said, you know, Putin just called me and he wants to meet. And she said, well, I'm really scared for you. I'm like, are you kidding? She said, how are you feeling? And I said, well, I would be more excited if it had been Perelman, but this is really good. Perelman was the first person that I wrote a book about who didn't talk to me, and Putin was the second. So, you know, it was the sense of meeting a character from your book. It's like, because the experience of writing nonfiction isn't that different from writing fiction in the sense that, you know, you have all this available information, then you construct a character to the best of your ability based on the available information. And so at that point, I felt like I had constructed him, and it was like getting a phone call from the protagonist of your novel who says, "I want to meet," and then you really want to see whether you got it right. And part of me wanted him to be exactly like the person in the book, And part of me wanted him to be different. Part of me wanted to make a discovery, to have him be more interesting, more deep, more human, because, you know, the guy in my book was pretty two-dimensional. And he was that. He was completely two-dimensional. Exactly the guy in my book, which was both gratifying and disappointing.

Why did Garry Kasparov fail at Russian politics and overthrowing Putin?

That's a great question.

Gary's a good friend of yours, right?

He's a friend of mine. He is, you know, and I think he is absolutely brilliant and he is also charismatic. I actually went on the road with him for a bit in, I guess, 2005. And when I was done, I thought, you know, I came home and I literally said to my partner, I said, you know, I want to quit journalism and like go work for him. He's amazing. He has an understanding of the world and politics and people like no one I've ever met. He is the smartest person I know. I just I just want to work for Gary. And so it's actually painful to see him living in exile on Upper West Side and having not just failed, right? I mean, anybody can fail in trying to overthrow a regime, but really having failed to make a dent. I mean, I think that most of it is that Putin controls the public sphere, right? Tried to run a fairly traditional campaign, organizing campaign, right, where he just traveled the country and met with people. And, you know, he'd get to a town and the hall that they had rented would be shut down and he wouldn't be able to talk to people. And, or like every person who was supposed to meet with him would have gotten a threatening phone call. I mean, he couldn't do that kind of grassroots level organizing that he set out to do and that he put all his resources and monitored. Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner, has shown how you can do organizing in a country that has destroyed a public sphere. And basically, you know, it's through the internet, it's through creating your own kind of media universe, which in a sense is what Donald Trump has done as well, right? But I think there are great limitations even to that strategy. But that's not what Garry was doing.

What's the biggest American misconception about modern-day Russia right now?

I don't know. Throw some at me and I'll tell you whether they're misconceptions or not.

Well, how about the stereotype of, you know, the strong Russian woman? There's a belief that there's a particular kind of woman in Russia, highly accomplished, super strong, almost like a superwoman.

Yes.

Is this true or a misconception? True, 100% true. And where does that come from?

Where does that come from? I think that comes from life. Um, uh, look, uh, you know, um, part of the Soviet experiment was this very strange gender equality ideology, right? Strange because it, it was an enforced ideology, right? It was, it was top-down. So it was women almost, um, were almost equally represented in the workforce to men, but of course at home they also did all the housework. And housework in the Soviet Union was not, you know, doing housework in the United States. It was washing clothes by hand, often, you know, in a communal bathroom or a communal bathhouse. It was cooking in a communal kitchen. It was getting, you know, getting food products in conditions of extreme shortages, right? It was like this constant battle for survival and for the survival of one's family. And I think that that made women strong, productive, and created a kind of matriarchal family that wouldn't exist if women weren't also, you know, breadwinners on par with men. But also, I think there may be something about women that is just more adaptable and more likely to take responsibility. And we really saw this after the Soviet Union collapsed, or even during perestroika, when men who lost their jobs and lost their bearings would often— and I'm, you know, I'm trafficking in stereotypes, but they are rooted in research— the men would stay at home and feel useless and lost, and women would go out and get new careers and new professions and new training and figure out ways to make money because they had to ultimately support the family. But what's your hypothesis?

Here's another possible misconception about Russia. I'm an American. I walk down the street in Moscow and it seems to me people don't smile very much. Now they in turn may see me smiling and think I'm stupid.

Absolutely.

Because I'm smiling. Now are they actually less happy or is that just a cultural difference that they don't smile as much and where does that come from?

Yes, people in Russia certainly do not smile as much. And yes, when I moved here in 1981, I thought Americans were so strange. And you know, we moved to Boston, not the smiley city in this country. Quite the contrary. Certainly not the friendliest. I thought, you know, Americans were bizarre, and they would say hello to you in the street for no reason. And, and yeah, I found them very unreasonably friendly. I think that there's a kind of grumpy and dark culture in Russia. Uh, Russians certainly, uh, are, you know, have a lot of discernment in the fine shades of misery. Uh, Russians do not cheerfully, you know, if you ask a Russian how they are, they will not cheerfully respond by saying, you know, they're great. And if they're miserable, they might actually share that with you in some detail. There's no shame in being miserable in Russia. There's, in fact, you know, there's a lot of validation. And, you know, read a Russian novel, you'll find it all in there. We really are connoisseurs of depression. So I think, you know, I think that that's— it's part of the culture, it's part of the literary culture, it's part of the narrative. It is also a function of powerlessness. And I think that it's, you know, according to Hannah Arendt, the defining condition of totalitarianism is loneliness. I think she is exactly right in her diagnosis. I think this is something that is often overlooked in her writing, but it's an incredible sort of humanistic discovery that I think she made in writing about totalitarianism. And I think that if you read, you know, when I teach Russian literature, I I teach it through that lens, right? The 20th century Russian literature, the lens of loneliness. And when we also look at some of the social phenomena in Russia, a lot of them are, you know, like, for example, excess mortality, are explainable through mass depression.

Now, America is a freer country, richer country, I hope a more stable country. Yet you moved back to Russia. At what age? And why did you move back there?

So I was, um, I was 24 when I first went back. So I was already a journalist, and I just went back on a story. And I thought, what? I mean, first of all, I was blown away by feeling at home, which is something I didn't expect. I had moved there when I was 14. I had no sort of sentimental attachment to Russia at that point. I really expected to feel like a foreign country where I was reporting, and I just happened to speak the language. Feeling physically comfortable in a way that I never did in New York, right? And I love the city, right? But somehow just, you know, the way the light fell, the way that the air smelled, everything about it was so comfortable. And I've talked since to many people who went back to their childhood countries, you know, not necessarily Russia. It is a sensation that catches you unaware as often and that is incredibly powerful. So that was part of it. It's not like I was walking around and thought, oh my God, I'm going to move back. This is home. Not at all. But it was very powerful. And the other thing was that it was the most interesting place in the world. It was March 1991. The Soviet Union still existed, but it was in such turmoil and people were having such important conversations and they were having them in a way that actually made it feel like those conversations would have consequences, right? And so it was irresistible to me as a journalist. So I started going back and forth, and after a couple years, I realized I should stop paying rent here and just move to Moscow.

And why did you move back here the second time? What, 6 years ago?

About 5 and a half years ago. Yeah, the anti-gay campaign started. I was at the time, you know, parenting 3 children with a woman and the state was threatening to take my oldest son, who is adopted, away and that didn't leave me any choice. I packed up and left.

In which way is American society more collectivist than that of Russia?

My initial response would be in no way.

Well, say you go to a high school football game. Isn't there a part of you that thinks, "Oh my goodness, all this conformism. I've read Tocqueville." you know, we Russians are the true individualists. What are all these people doing shouting at the same time over nothing? Is there no part of America that brings forth that reaction in you?

You know, I probably haven't had that experience of America, Tyler. I've never been to a high school football game.

We'll bring you sometime.

My oldest son, I mean, he graduated from high school here in New York, but he went to specialized music school high school, not a football-playing school, and My second child is unschooled.

Let's see if you can talk me out of another possible misconception about Russia, and that is I have the sense that there are only about 5 first names for women in Russia. There's Masha, there's Anya, there's Natasha. And why is this? Why is this the equilibrium? Why don't more people deviate when naming their children?

You know, Russia, I mean, Russia is a conformist society and people, yeah, my friends have kids who have different names.

Right?

But it only became possible really to give your children names that kind of marked them out after the Soviet Union collapsed. So all of my friends have the same name and then all of our children have bizarrely different names.

Now in the middle of all these conversations, there's a segment called Overrated vs. Underrated, and I'll toss out some notions and you tell me if you think they're overrated or underrated, okay? Tarkovsky movies.

Oh God, overrated.

Why?

I can't stand them. I'm sorry.

Bagels, overrated or underrated? Um, underrated. Especially in New York?

Yeah, I'm thinking sort of more globally.

Spending time on Facebook.

Depends on what you do.

For you?

For me, it's essential. It's essential to my work. I, you know, it doesn't feel like a waste of time. Sometimes it's a waste of time, but if it's a waste of time, it's basically me working inefficiently. But it's an essential part of my work.

American television as a whole, underrated or overrated?

Currently, probably overrated.

Why?

I think we've gotten used to the idea that we're in the golden age of television, which, you know, in the sense of how many things are being produced, is absolutely true. But if there used to be the presumption that if something is on television, it's probably terrible, and if it has any redeeming qualities to it, that's already extraordinary. And I think we've gone over to the opposite side where we assume that something is a masterpiece. So, you know, for example, I had to endure the 5 episodes of Chernobyl because I had to write about it. And it was really an ordeal. I thought it was terrible. And not just because I thought, you know, it was reductionist, but I thought the writing was awful. The dialogue was horrible. And I don't know why, like, you know, it was incredibly well received by critics, among others. It's like we no longer have an ear for bad writing on television.

Why was the last year of The Americans so good? And I know you've worked for the show as a translator, but what made that so magical toward the end?

I thought all of it was actually amazing. But, you know, The Americans is like the exact opposite of Chernobyl in the sense that it's actually— and it was a very strange experience for me as a translator because I translated all the Russian scenes in the last 3 seasons. And there was like almost nothing in the dialogue. Like everything that happened in The Americans happened not in what people said, but what they felt, how they acted things. I mean, it was, in that sense, it was very good filmmaking, right? Whereas in Chernobyl, like, everything is processed and dispensed and explained and over-explained in dialogue. And I think that what made The Americans so good and made it get better as it went on was the psychological depth of not speaking things out, but showing things and, you know, and showing relationships develop and disintegrate on screen without everything having to be spelled out.

Tolstoy's long short story, "Haji Murad," overrated or underrated? Where? In America.

In America, underrated.

How do we fix the college admissions scandal? A simple question.

We nationalize higher education.

What does that mean?

I mean, it means we have to talk about it to learn to think about higher education as a public good. There has to be a way to create publicly funded higher education that doesn't cost an impossible amount of money for most people who want to get higher education. I think it would also have the result of leveling sort of the field among colleges. I mean, there are lots of normal countries that have normal higher education where—

But they have worse systems than we do, it seems. German higher education is nationalized, it's close to free, it seems starved of funds, lower quality than what America produces, and Germany's a smart, fairly effective country.

I don't know that it's necessarily lower quality than what America produces. How do you measure that?

Say Nobel Prizes or the value of the degree in terms of earnings.

I don't think Nobel Prizes are a great way to to measure it because, you know, a lot of people come to the United States to do research in university settings and end up winning Nobel Prizes. That doesn't tell us a whole lot about the difference between higher education in this country and the countries that we draw from, right? But look, you know, look at like Australian education, next to free, basically every— the stress of getting into a university is— it exists, but it's so much less than it is in this country. You basically assume that you're going to go to university in your city, the best university or the second best or the third best. You're going to get in, you're going to get an education. That education is going to allow you to work professionally after you get in, depending on your grades, you know, you're going to get into the better or the worst university. And it's not You know, it doesn't have the import that it has here where, you know, where young people feel like their lives depend on it, depend on where they get in, which, you know, seems just absurd. And like, I'm rambling because this is very close to home because I'm also like involved in these arguments with my kids about their education, you know, and I say to my daughter, look, it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter which college you go to. You can get a really good education anywhere, which is true in this country. And you can also be miserable anywhere. So just look at some places, look at what looks good to you, have a few safety schools, relax. He says, no, no, you don't understand. I'm never going to be successful if I don't go to one of the best colleges. That is patently not true. But that's the kind of stress environment that that is created even for an unschooled kid, you know, so outside a high-pressure high school environment, even with a parent who is like me.

It was about 15 years ago that you described with very powerful writing the choices that you took when you learned you had a diagnosis of having some cancer mutations. And if I understand this correctly, you chose to have a double mastectomy but not to have your ovaries removed. And you wrote about this in a book. 15 years later, what would you say to someone who faces the same diagnosis today? What advice would you give them, or how does it look different to you 15 years on?

You know, I haven't fully kept up with the research. I did end up having my ovaries removed when I was 50, so— but I'm really glad I had the extra, you know, more than a decade of hormones. I would say do your research. I think that some of the interesting things that I found when I was researching— and the reason I ended up writing a book is that when I found out I had this deleterious mutation, this was really in the early days of this kind of thing. And I just felt like I realized I couldn't process information. So then I thought, oh, well, I used to be a medical reporter. I used to be able to read medical papers and actually process this stuff. So I just have to stop thinking of myself as the person who's trying to make a decision and think of this as a research project. So then I sold a series of stories to Slate, and the project was to conduct a series of interviews with people who could give me information that would help me make a decision, and then at the end of the series, make a decision. So I did that over the course of something like 8 weeks for Slate, and I cast a much wider net than you normally would. Normally, people would go talk to an oncologist and a genetic counselor and make a decision.

And you went to the Harvard economist David Leibson, right?

One of the people I went to, yes, and many other people. But yes, that was actually one of the best interviews. Although, you know, he— we devised a formula together, and the formula suggested that that I should have both the oophorectomy and the mastectomy. But then I ended up deciding to just have the mastectomy. But one of the things I realized, and this is just a small illustration of how, you know, of people's heuristics. I realized that doctors were pushing women to have oophorectomies, the removal of the ovaries, and not mastectomies because an oophorectomy is a very easy surgery and you cannot see outward expressions of it. The easy surgery has a much greater impact on health. I mean, everything in your body is hormone-dependent in some way or another. And so it is— it completely changes the functioning of the body, whereas the more complicated surgery that a mastectomy is, and that has clearly visible results, actually has no impact on health whatsoever. But doctors have this very strong bias that results from what is an easier surgery with a shorter recovery time, right? But then, you know, no long-term consequences seems like a better solution to them.

And how did that whole experience change your sense of what is valuable in life?

You ask all the really easy questions. You know, it actually— I don't know that it changed my sense of what is valuable in life. I definitely think that, you know, life is more important than breasts, but I probably thought that before that question was put to me as well. But it actually had an impact sort of long-term on how I think about gender, right? How? So, you know, I was not at that time particularly thinking about experimenting with gender. I was perfectly happy living as a woman and having all the organs that go with that. And then as I went on and shed the organs that go with womanhood, I thought, well, this is, you know, like now I'm a body without organs and hormones. So what am I going to do about this? And I've actually made decisions about hormones, hormone replacement, as a kind of blank slate, right? I went on female hormones at first. I went on estrogen. I mean, female and male, obviously, you know, both men and women have both estrogen and testosterone, but in different proportions. And I felt horrible. I felt really, really awful taking estrogen. I thought, okay, well, let me go in the other direction. And I started taking testosterone. And I'm having a lot more fun on testosterone. Then I did an estrogen, a very low dose, but that has created a kind of non-binary gender situation for me. But for me, sort of the physical stuff was primary and then the gender stuff is secondary.

Now I have a few questions about what I call the Masha Gessen production function, how you manage to do and be what you are. First question, super simple, like, like the others: how is it you manage to read so much in so many different areas? You have a book on terrorism. We didn't even get to talk about that, right? You have a book on Pussy Riot that hasn't been mentioned. So how do you absorb? What's your trick?

Well, you assume that if I write, I read.

There are footnotes in all of these books.

This is true. I am, you know, I mean, I don't actually think I read an extraordinary amount. I'm a pretty slow reader. It's just I have the luxury, you know, I have a year or two to write a book. And I can read extensively on the topic and I absorb very well and then I forget it all. A friend of mine once called me an empty pot.

How do you manage to follow politics in two very different, very large countries at the same time?

I'm always feeling like I'm not following enough, like I don't— like I'm not getting enough information.

And your dream is to follow more rather than less?

That's depressing in a way. My dream is to feel like I have a better handle on things. I mean, Russia is much simpler in a way, you know, very little happens, in fact. Or what happens is more or less the same thing over and over again. So I find it, you know, and that's what I mean when I say that Facebook, spending time on Facebook is really part of my work. I try to have a sense of the temperature of the air, the flavor of the conversation. And that's where social networks used strategically, I think, are extremely useful. It's the kind of research tool that I didn't have as a young journalist, and I really appreciate it now. As for American politics, I'm always in fear of missing stuff, like major stuff. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I bike a lot. And whenever I'm biking, I'm listening to podcasts and I try to switch among podcasts a lot. But then, you know, like I go hiking and I go offline for 24 hours and stuff happens. And then I discover that it happened days later because there's another news cycle. I mean, you know, like the insanity of the news cycle is impossible.

Putting normative questions aside, just analytically, what do you wish you understood about American politics that you feel maybe you don't?

That's a question that is actually objectively impossible to answer. Because if I understood what I don't understand, then I'd go and understand it, wouldn't I?

Well, I might feel I wish I understood how Congress influences regulatory agencies more than it does, or voter behavior might be the thing I don't understand, or what presidents actually seek to maximize, or state and local government.

No, I think that, you know, those are research questions. I don't feel a deficit in that area because I, you know, You can always do the research to answer a research question. I think there are sort of cultural deficits that I have because I didn't grow up here. And in fact, I didn't— I haven't lived here most of my life. In some ways, that gives me a good perch because it's sometimes really beneficial to write about things as an outsider, as an informed outsider. But I think where I'm at a huge disadvantage is race politics. Not having grown up in this country, I never feel on solid footing.

And you don't seem to write about it much, if at all. Is that impression correct?

That's correct, because, yeah, because I don't feel I can.

Yeah. Now, you had an early career as a journalist in Chechnya, right? Yes. How did that shape your later views? I mean, that must have been quite formative.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe— well, one way it shaped my views is that I'm a pacifist. And I think that being a war reporter will do that for you. That's actually influenced how I bring up my kids, right? There are never guns in the house. There are no war games. And I talk to them at length about why that is.

And that sticks, you think?

Yeah, of course, it can't not stick. I mean, it may be traumatic because they don't get to play with some of the same things that their friends play with. But it makes an impression.

What is your most unusual writing habit?

I write by hand.

You write by hand?

I write by hand.

And someone types it into a computer, or that never happens?

No, I write books longhand, and then I type them up chapter by chapter. So I write a chapter out longhand.

And why is that good for you?

Because I think that the process of writing longhand is more linear. If you ever look at how you write, or if I ever look at how I write, if I just write on a computer, unless it's— a column is also pretty linear. I mean, I outline it and then I just fill in every paragraph, but, and I do that on a computer. But if I write a very long piece, I don't notice how much I jump around when I'm writing on a computer. You can't do that on paper. You have to keep going, and that imposes a kind of narrative structure. That is unbreakable. I mean, one sentence has to follow the previous sentence. You can't go back and reinsert it, right? So it keeps me very focused, I find. And the other thing it does is that when I'm typing it up, I'm reading it on paper. And I think that there's a difference. I will then, you know, when the book is ready, I will then print it out and edit it again on paper. Right? But every time you read, when you're reading on paper and you're reading on screen, you're seeing completely different things.

And you listen to music when you write?

No.

Never?

I used to, but I don't now.

What book would we be most surprised to see on your bookshelf? At least the active section of your bookshelf.

I don't know, actually. I'm not convinced that there's anything surprising on my bookshelf. I think it's probably pretty predictable.

And you just, you buy books on Amazon and they arrive?

I buy books on Amazon a lot of the time. Books just come. I mean, that's the advantage of being a writer and a journalist is that people send me books.

And if you were to describe your philosophy of child rearing other than pacifism, what else would you say?

I think that the best thing I do as a parent, and I do many things not very well, but the best thing I do as a parent is all my kids have always been included in adult conversations. We always talk about everything. Part of it is laziness. I mean, I can't, like, separate things out, but my kids have grown up hanging out with adults, being very comfortable being part of adult conversation, but also knowing that they can have a say and they can, you know, have an opinion on whatever political issue is being discussed, regardless of what age they are.

Do you think there's too much age segregation in the United States?

I think there is. I see that Among my kids, my older kids' friends, like when, as teenagers, they started bringing friends home and I realized that these young people had no experience socializing with people their parents' ages.

Last two questions before we turn to Q&A. First, if a very smart young person, say 18, 19 years old, came up to you and said they wanted to be like the Moshe Gessen of the next generation and they asked you for advice, non-trivial advice, What would you tell them?

I would probably tell them to take as many risks as possible.

As many risks as possible. And finally, what's your next project?

So I'm working on a book. I'm actually about to set it aside for a couple of months, but I've been working on a book for a couple years on imaginative political projects, and it's based on a concept from Czechoslovakia from the 1970s, from Charter 77. The concept of the parallel polis, which is, and I think you might actually find this, this might relate to your work in a way. So the idea of the parallel polis is that in a totalitarian society, you can create a sort of an experimental society that functions according to a different set of rules in at least one area. So it might be economically different or socially different or politically different or religiously different or different in other areas. Then when the totalitarian society collapses under its own weight all around you, you have a working model of the future. I start there and I look at some societies that are very close to being totalitarian in the sense that people have no influence on the larger politics of it and look at those kinds of projects there. Then I argue that actually that has implications not just for totalitarian societies but for societies wherever a democracy is broken or part of a democracy is broken. You can see an imaginative project like that can be very important. And then I even argued that it doesn't even have to be a non-state actor. It can be a state actor that creates a project that kind of imagines something into being.

Masha Gessen, thank you very much. We now have time for questions. I will call on you. Please wait for the microphone to come over. From the floor, yes.

Uh, you mentioned that there was no shame in being miserable in Russia, or there's no shame in misery. I was wondering how, like, jubilation or, like, excessive cheer was viewed. With suspicion. That's a, that's a fair question. Yes, um, unless it's, uh, it's a kind of, you know, collective, um, drunken moment of exhilaration. Yes, excessive cheers is viewed with with suspicion. One might be suspected of being an optimistic idiot.

Next question, further back.

Hello, thank you so much for being here. I apologize for knowing what I was going to ask you beforehand, but you recently wrote an article for The New Yorker in which you critique Pete Buttigieg's speech where he talks about his experience growing up as a homosexual, where he's like like, you know, if I could find the part of me that was gay and cut it out, I would have done that. And you were saying like, you know, it's kind of problematic because it posits that heterosexuality is like the better default and that like you need to like have to be forced to be gay in order to be accepted. But I was wondering if you think that that kind of like essentialist reduction stuff is like useful in certain cases, as a political tool, like for example modern Russia with the situation that's going on there?

So, um, it has, yeah, it has proven to be an extremely effective political tool. That has, it has, it, this is the narrative. And, you know, I want to make it clear, I'm not critiquing Pete or criticizing Pete Buttigieg's, um, personal story. His, you know, obviously his story is his story. I'm criticizing his choice to use this narrative that is a very traditional gay rights narrative, uh, that is rooted in the argument of choicelessness, right? And implicit in that argument is this idea that gay people should have rights because they didn't have any other option, and that if sexuality were choosable, then that choice shouldn't be validated, right? I find that deeply problematic because I think it doesn't correspond to everybody's human experience of sexuality. And I also think that it is ultimately— it is ultimately not progressive. It ultimately is not liberatory. Right? But it is, of course, as a reductionist narrative, very useful, and it has proven to be politically, at least in the short term, very effective in, in this country. I mean, a lot of the gains in gay rights have been rooted in that argument.

Next question. Yes.

Hi, thank you so much for being here. If America were to collapse as the Soviet Union did, How do you— how would you posit that resulting states might sort of emerge from that?

How, uh, how would I expect them to?

If America just broke apart as a union and like different states were forced to form into new countries, as happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, right?

Um, you know, I mean, I, I don't know that that's a great analogy. Uh, the Soviet Union was genuinely an empire, you know, it was just a contiguous empire. So not everybody recognized it as such, but there was an imperial power. There were many, many, many colonized people. The borders between those colonies were known. And there was, in every colony, there was a national identity that could be kind of resurrected and a national narrative that could be created. I don't think that's true in— I mean, it's not true in this country, right? We have borders between states, but we don't have national identities in states, and we don't have clear ethnic majorities in different states that would create that kind of national narrative. So I, yeah, I'm having trouble with the parallel. Sorry.

Next question. Yes, up front. Let me ask you one while the microphone is coming. If Ukraine became a free, successful democratic state, would autocracy in Russia go away?

No.

Why not? Wouldn't it be such an example?

No relation.

No relation.

I mean, that's a great question actually, because it is a very common fallacy, and it is a fallacy that comes from Russia, which fails to understand both Russian— both the Kremlin and the Russian opposition. Actually fail to understand that Ukraine is a separate country with, at this point, a very different political culture. It's been a generation, right, since the Soviet Union collapsed, and Ukraine has spent that generation— now more than a generation, 28 years— Ukraine has spent that, that period in a transitional state. It hasn't been a functional democracy, but it has also not been an autocracy in that long Right? So that has created a completely different set of expectations and a really very different culture. And I feel it when I go to Ukraine, when I talk to people, when I interview people. You realize that there are different kinds of relationships of trust. There are very different expectations of the possibility of political action. There are very different expectations of accountability, despite the level, the very high level of corruption in Ukraine, whereas Russia has basically spent the last 20 years as an autocracy. And Russians have this magical thinking, both the Kremlin and the opposition have this magical idea that Ukraine is like a smaller mirror of Russia and whatever happens in Ukraine is then going to happen in Russia.

Now to the question upfront.

So you mentioned how internet access in Russia can offer a little bit of an escape from this very tightly controlled public control over the communications. Are there ways in which you think the somewhat greater freedom among these online communities has led to different cultures or different sort of norms from those that have been established under this strict totalitarian regime?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't want to exaggerate, right? Because as you know, we've gone from this dominant idea of the internet is inherently democratic to this dominant idea of the internet is inherently undemocratic. And it's not inherently anything, but Alexei Navalny has been able to use his online presence to circumvent the Kremlin's control over the public sphere. That has required a set of conditions, the most important of which is just he's very good at what he does, and he found the one thing that millions and millions of Russians find compelling. Which is proving corruption and validating their sense of constantly being lied to and stolen from. But there are also limitations to that kind of organizing. And I find those limitations fascinating because when we talk about organizing, we usually assume that there's a kind of collective action at work, right? And politics is acting with others. And I think that there's a very different kind of organizing than Navalny does, because Navalny will publish like an appeal on YouTube and people will go out and protest in more than 100 towns around Russia at the same time. And it looks like collective action, but I would argue that it's not, because it's one individual at a time watching the video on YouTube, going out into the public square and going home without actually having done anything together with any other people in their town except for being present in the square at that particular moment. And that is completely different from, you know, from actual political organizing and collective action as we know it. Does that distinction matter? I think it does. I think that the experience of physically and on an ongoing basis interacting with other people in the political space is essential for politics.

Next question. Yes.

Suppose tensions rise substantially between Russia and the West, perhaps level of open military conflict. Is it more likely that Russia cuts off Western access to networks or vice versa?

And would be more—

would you predict it's more likely because of cybersecurity or journalism, politics, accessibility, information?

What was the last part?

Like, would it be more, more because of cybersecurity and hacking, or more because of access to these, you know, political organizations and journalistic information?

Right. I think that Russia is very likely to cordon off its internet. I think that the pretext would be cybersecurity, uh, which may not be quite so much of a pretext. I think that that the effect and the desired effect would be total informational isolation of the Russian public.

Next question. Yes, way in the back. While the mic is going, my quick question: if you were advising a hedge fund as to what they could learn from training of talent in the world of Soviet mathematics, what would you tell them?

I would tell them that In the abstract. I would actually tell them that maybe it's better to have not quite such amazingly trained talent, but to live in a freer society.

In the back, yes.

Why is there currently less, or not very much, control over the internet in Soviet Russia? In Russia, sorry.

That's right. It actually goes to what I said earlier about Putin's economy of means. There's as much control as necessary. The Internet Oversight Agency has shut down access to a number of opposition websites. That means the vast majority of Russians don't have access, even if they maybe want to, Right? They don't have access to anything that contradicts the dominant narrative. But the internet, you know, is— it's not push media. The internet is a place where you don't get answers to questions you don't ask. I think that the Kremlin is sensitive to that, even if they can't necessarily articulate it. There's not a whole lot of danger coming out of the internet. For the Kremlin.

Next question.

So in the context of your current project on alternative polis, was it?

Parallel polis.

Parallel polis. What do you see as example or examples of that currently in Russia or in America? And do you see the internet as a vehicle for that or in kind of what you were saying about this mobilization not actually being a collective action but being this individual action, do you think that that actually detracts from parallel polis?

Yeah, it has to be not just parallel but polis, right? And polis can't be homogenous. There has to be some sort of cooperation across difference for a parallel polis or any kind of polis to exist. That's something that doesn't happen a whole lot on the internet. I also think that, you know, again, politics is something that has a physical dimension, so I'm only looking at actually existing physical projects. In the States, I'm looking at a particular complicated project in Detroit that's an urban farm/public space history/community-based economy project. And I'm not actually looking at any in Russia.

The other question on this side.

Is there good Russian food in New York and where can I find it? Yeah, I like Mari Vanda, which is a restaurant on East 21st, I think. It's pricey but really good.

Last question comes from me. Obviously there are many famous works of Russian literature, but if you had to recommend to us something in particular we ought to read that's special to you and maybe not something which everyone reads, what would that be and why?

Um, I don't know that the books I would recommend have been translated to English.

Tell us one nonetheless, and I'll give you one more question then.

Okay, so, um, Two books I would recommend. One is Prochirk, which is, um, it's one's omission or illusion, uh, by Lidia Cherkovska, which is an amazing book about, um, about the absence of her husband. He was arrested when they were quite young. I think she was 25. She never saw him again. And she spent the next— she was a great writer who wrote many great books, but this is a book that she kept going back to over the course of, I think, 45 years up until her death, trying to write it. And it's really, it's a book about absence, but it's also a book about the absolute senselessness of terror. And I think that's one of the hardest things for a writer to convey, because how do you write about something that is senseless? The moment you start writing about it, you're imbuing it with meaning. It's actually very, very hard. And that book succeeds. And another book that I love is, I think has been translated into English. It's by Dina Kaminskaya, and it's called An Attorney's Notes or something like that. She was a defense attorney who defended dissidents in the Soviet Union and ended up having to immigrate to this country quite late. I think she was in her 60s or 70s when she finally got forced out of the country. But it's an incredible sort of anatomy of the corruption of not just the Soviet court system, but of the possibility of legal thinking in the Soviet Union. I think it's the best book about the Soviet system that I know. Also, fun fact, Dina Kaminska was Dmitry Sime's mother.

Final question. You know, the new Cold War with Russia. How much did America provoke Russia with NATO expansion, electoral influence in Ukraine, and even earlier, the Serbia-Kosovo intervention? Who started it, in a sense?

Yeah, I don't have a lot of patience for the NATO expansion argument, for the simple reason that it fails to take into account the countries that joined NATO. All the countries that joined NATO, without exception, asked to join NATO, begged to join NATO because they wanted to have protection against Russia, which had colonized them and which they had good reason to suspect might want to colonize them again. So they wanted to be a part of NATO. This idea that the United States provoked Russia by taking those countries under its wing completely ignores the agency and desire of the people of those countries. Kosovo, I think, was huge. And I think that we still have to reckon with the corrosive effect of the illegal bombing campaign in Kosovo, both on Russia, but also on American politics and on international politics and politics of military intervention.

Masha Gessen, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler.

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